Legal Issues

Aardwolf commercially violating diku licence

First, the facts you will need to know in order to flame me correctly,
I'm a player at Aardwolf. Oh yes, I've reached the impressive level of 9. Feel free to consider me a zealot who will say anything to defend the mud I play at. (I'm an imm (or wizard really, as it's LP) on another mud and have 982 levels on different characters on yet another mud, but who cares?)
Furthermore, I've not posted here before unless I recently started sleepwalking and doing the posting without my own knowledge. Since I'm not 100% certain, you may feel free to flame me on the grounds of me being another poster creating new alias in order to state my opinions in a less stigmatized persona. Now, you will of course need some quotes too...

I think you're going about this in the wrong way. You've found things you don't agree on, and keep trying to convince each other. I promise, this is futile. After many stupid flamewars on IRC, I know that very few will allow themselves to be convinced and even fewer will actually admit to being convinced. So, let's look at what you're agreeing on instead.
1) The people who wrote the DIKU license were students, not lawyers.
2) The license is simple and easy to understand, unless you're deliberately trying to interpret it to your benefit.

Now, let's think about this for a minute. The people who wrote the license were not lawyers and did probably not look up various definitions of the word 'profit' before adding it to the license. How would the average student interpret the word then? As I'm a student, I take the liberty of interpreting 'profit' as the money the shopowner has left when he has paid his employees, tax, rent and refilled the stockroom. When asking other students I am presented with a similar definition. (Well, except the one who explained to me it's a guy who is standing on a box and shouting things about biblical characters, but I think she misheard it as 'prophet'.) Now, you guys can probably argue that it's already eastablished that the license read 'make profit', not 'profit'. Please do. It will just show you totally missed the point, and enable me to laugh. Laugh more - live longer!

If I hadn't read this forum and decided to download and set up DIKU on some server today, I'd interpret the license as follows;

1) I may not charge people to play, including charging for special benefits in the game.
2) I may not charge people if I provide them with the DIKUMUD software.

If I suddenly found myself in need of more money to be able to afford keeping the mud server online, I'd of course turn to those who have a similar interest: the players. It's pretty obvious that I can't _force_ them to pay due to the license. but how about begging for money, ie donations? If I give some money to a beggar in the street, and he goes to 7-eleven and buys a hot dog for it, was that profit? Perhaps to the IRS, but I would not think of it that way, and thus I would not believe it was against the license to keep my game up with the help of donations.

I think very few people go around analyzing every little action and pondering whether or not it's okay with laws and ethic. I don't stop and consider my actions unless I've got an indication that what I'm doing is wrong. If you're never told stealing is wrong, how will you know? The license LOOKS clear, so I will have no reason to start pondering it, unless given one.

However, if I DO stop to ponder donation to MUDs, I soon realize that you do indeed get a reward. The MUD stays up, it lags less and can support bigger areas and more people. The difference between this and a token reward is extremely small. However, here's where I'd stop and ponder the license (if I still kept it in mind, which is doubtful) and realize what I do *might* be wrong and that it's probably time to find out exactly what the license allows me to do. Here's the problem, I believe. The license doesn't really deal with this as the authors only seem to foresee two options: free and pay2play/pay4features. The QP/TP you receive for donating to Aardwolf can indeed be retrieved without donation, just by spending some time on it. I even managed to buy a pretitle for 2 TP without donating (If you wonder, it's 'Santa' of course - 'Santa Claws'). This would be $4, btw.
Like someone said, this is a very gray area (as in not good, but not entirely bad either). So it's nice that Aardwolf is trying to move out of it by building anew on socketmud (even though they claim this isn't the reason). I don't see the other people in this forum doing anything about this issue, so I think they (Aardwolf) deserve an applause for taking action.

Now, if what happens to DIKU hurts DIKU II, why on earth haven't the DIKU team written a new license yet? It's quite obvious the old one is lacking.

Disclaimer: I've looked at this from my point of view, as that seem to be physically possible, unlike the lawyer's point of view as I'm not a lawyer and quite frankly don't know how to look out from one. Also, all opinions presented in this text are belong to me (sorry, couldn't resist) and me only. Feel free to share them, though. I won't charge ye. All grammatical errors as well as typos are due to me being a rutabaga (or maybe it was swede? whatever).

Speaking as moderator: Pretty much everything that can be said, has been said. So rather than having to keep going over the same points every time another Aardwolf player comes along, I'm just going to freeze the thread.